Two non-profit and non-partisan investigative journalism organizations, the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News, have concluded through their joint investigation that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Railroad Commission protect the oil and gas industry instead of the public whom they claim to serve.

Fred Wright and Morris Kocurek were two oil and gas regulators working for the Texas Railroad Commission who received praise from their supervisors, promotions, and merit raises throughout their careers. But they may have done their jobs too well. They were fired in 2013 for what they believe to be their insistence in making sure oil and gas operators followed the rules and regulations in place to protect the public and the environment.

Wright was responsible for determining whether oil and gas wells were up to code to prevent groundwater contamination. He was often encouraged or coerced by his superiors to bend the rules, to say that operators had met compliance standards when they had not. In 2013, his superiors told him that complaints had been filed against him by the operators claiming he was “unreasonable to work with” and “does not attempt to offer solutions to bring them in compliance with commission rules”, citing that Fred’s methods for compliance would be “costly”. Wright’s boss at the time, Charlie Teague, insisted that Write approve oil and gas wells despite the fact that they were in violation of statewide rules.

As the enforcer of proper toxic waste disposal in the oil and gas industry, Kocurek faced very similar problems. He said his bosses made it clear that he was supposed to go easy on the industry. The violation notices Kocurek filed were usually processed very slowly and follow-up inspections were assigned to the more lenient inspectors. Eventually, Kocurek realized the influence that the industry had on its supposed regulators and his reports were all ignored. Violations would disappear after the right phone calls were made.

Documents obtained from the Railroad Commission through the open-records corroborate the stories of Mr. Wright and Mr. Kocurek. Wright has filed a civil lawsuit alleging wrongful termination. He has also filed a federal whistleblower complaint. Kocurek, on the other hand, hasn’t taken any legal action and would rather forget the whole thing.

According to InsideClimate News and the Center for Public Integrity, the Railroad Commission is controlled by three elected commissioners who have accepted nearly $3 million combined in campaign contributions from the industry during the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, according to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In the case of the Railroad Commission and the TCEQ, money talks and it’s louder than the voice of Texas citizens.

After only a day of deliberation, the jury has returned a guilty verdict on former Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) general manager Bennie Fuelberg on all counts of money laundering, theft, and misapplication of fiduciary property.

During the two weeks of trial, the prosecution showed how Bennie Fuelberg filtered money through Clark, Thomas & White, the co-op’s law firm, to his lobbyist brother, Curtis, and Bill Price, the son of a co-op board member. Fuelberg also misdirected staff, removing oversight of the co-ops legal bills from other managers in an attempt to hide the money being passed through to his brother.

Prosecutor Harry White detailed this in his closing arguments Thursday: “The reason Bennie Fuelberg kept a secret was because he knew it was wrong. What he did was he took money that didn’t belong to him, that belonged to normal people, and gave it to his brother.”

As an aside, Clark, Thomas & White repaid over $4 million in fees to PEC in a separate lawsuit, showing just how much money Bennie siphoned away from the co-op over the years.

Several of us here at Public Citizen are current or former PEC members. We were part of the original investigations and lawsuits that opened up the wretched hive of scum and villany that Fuelberg had turned the co-op into, and have worked for and are proud of the reforms that have taken place in the past few years.

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By promoting cleaner energy, cleaner government, and cleaner air for all Texans, we hope to provide for a healthy place to live and prosper. We are Public Citizen Texas.

With last week’s conviction of Tom Delay, is it too much to hope that another Texas scoundrel gets justice, too?

Less politically charged but no less important, for PEC Director Bennie Fuelberg will go on trial in Fredericksburg, where the trial was moved because the judge decided Fuelberg was unlikely to get a fair trial if tried in Pedernales territory. He was probably right.

In what is arguably the climax to more than three years of lawsuits, grand jury indictments, legislation, allegations of corruption, congressional hearings, reforms and resignations at the Pedernales Electric Cooperative not to mention newspaper stories detailing it all the utility’s former chief executive will go on trial today in Fredericksburg.

Before his June 2009 indictment on felony theft and money laundering charges, former Pedernales General Manager Bennie Fuelberg was one of the Hill Country’s most prominent citizens. Now, his name is often tossed about by co-op leaders and employees as synonymous with scandal and cronyism.

The trial, prosecuted by the Texas attorney general’s office after a Hill Country district attorney stepped aside, could be the completion of Fuelberg’s fall from grace — or it could result in his exoneration.

Fuelberg, who ran the nation’s largest member-owned electric utility for more than 30 years, is charged with misapplication of fiduciary duty in excess of $200,000, theft of property in excess of $200,000 and money laundering between $100,000 and $200,000. The first two charges are first-degree felonies that carry a penalty of up to 99 years in prison if convicted; the last charge is a second-degree felony that carries up to 20 years.

Fuelberg and the co-op’s former outside counsel, Walter Demond, were indicted on identical charges last year after a five-month grand jury investigation. Demond will be tried after Fuelberg. Both have pleaded not guilty. The grand jury’s term has since expired, and no other indictments have been handed up.

The criminal charges stem from accusations that the men arranged for thousands of dollars of co-op money to be paid to relatives of Pedernales executives. According to the indictments, payments exceeding $200,000 went to Curtis Fuelberg, Bennie Fuelberg’s brother, and William Price, the son of former Director E.B. Price. (more…)

You are invited to attend the press conference as well, held by the SEED Coalition, Public Citizen, and Sierra Club, on stopping Texas from becoming the nation’s radioactive waste dump, the inadequacies of the west Texas dump site and the corruption surrounding the permitting process.

* Tell the Compact Commission not to allow import of radioactive waste into Texas from the rest of the country!

All of the State TCEQ scientists who worked on the permit for the West Texas dump site, owned by Waste Control Specialists (WCS), determined the site to be inadequate because of the possible radioactive contamination of our aquifers and groundwater. Corruption and politics led to the permitting of the site anyways, ignoring the entire TCEQ technical team’s recommendation against issuing the permit. 3 TCEQ employees quit over the decision.

Now the Compact Commission is putting rules in place, to let nuclear power waste from across the country into Texas, making this site the nation’s radioactive waste dumping ground. The Texas Compact Commission, appointed by Governor Perry, and responsible for managing so-called “low-level” radioactive waste generated within its boundaries, is developing rules for importation of radioactive waste from outside the compact (TX and Vermont), AGAINST the original intent of the law, which was for only the 3 states of the compact to be able to dump there.

The Commission is taking comments from stakeholders on the development of the import rule. We want to let them know that the generators of nuclear waste and the dump company that is profiting from taking the waste are not the only stakeholders in this process. Please come help make the voices of the public, Texas taxpayers, and water drinkers heard LOUD and CLEAR.

As I commented in response to some of your reader’s comments below, the point was never to drag Gov. Richardson through the mud. Indeed, considering his eventual vindication, it re-emphasizes the point that if we had a system of public financing, no politician would ever face erroneous charges such as this.

Money muddies the water, both for the good public servant and the bad politician , and anyone we force to raise private campaign cash we are asking them to prostitute their opinions on the altar of political expediency. And we get the system we deserve because of it.

Original Post: Jan 5, 2009

I’ve heard it said that churches are supposed to make bad men good and good men better. Our campaign finance system seems to do the opposite: make good men bad and bad men worse (ie, Governors Richardson and Blagojevich, respectively). As far back as Socrates, outside observers have noticed the corruptive influence of money on public policy. Our public servants worshiping at the altar of campaign donations is sure path to hell for most of us. But the fact that we force them to do so by not providing a public financing system begs the question: Are we getting what we deserve?

As Richardson withdraws his name for consideration of being Commerce Secretary, more and more details are coming out about his ethical problems. Did he take campaign donations that changed his votes? Possibly, or at least there’s enough of an ethical cloud there that no one can know for sure.

And that’s the problem with how we finance our campaigns. No one can ever be truly sure that their Legislators, Representatives, Senators, Mayors, Governors, or Presidents are taking a position because of the merits of the proposals themselves, or because someone with deep pockets convinced them that’s how they should vote. The same can be said of incoming Senatorial appointee Roland Burris. It’s surely not his fault that Blagojevich is a slimeball, but the public just can’t be certain that he was appointed based on his merits alone and not because Blagojevich had some ulterior motive.

The only way to remove all doubt is by supporting public financing. We can only hope during this next Congress that we see some real leadership on this issue so that We the People can know that we are, indeed, still the ones in charge of our government and not the other way around.